Dear young fan fiction author
Dear young fan fiction author,
I know it's hard to imagine, but we have not always had email. When a character in your story, played by an actor who looks older than I do, checks his email in bed before getting up because he got in the habit in college, it kind of throws me out of the story while I check the actor's IMDB entry just in case he's actually younger than I am. But no, the actor was born in 1962 and the character is generally considered to be around the same age. Which means that when he went to college, starting in 1980 or thereabouts if he was eighteen, he probably didn't have a computer, let alone an email address, let alone a computer he could use in bed.
For reference purposes, your character would have graduated from college before AOL was formed and before Microsoft released MS-DOS. He was in college, barely, when Apple released the Mackintosh, the first Mackintosh, long before Apple called everything an iSomething. He would have a junior before SMTP was formulated as the standard email protocol.
The short form of this is that having a fifty-two year old man reminisce about his email in college is only slightly less jarring than having Elizabeth Bennett calling her aunt in London in 1801.
Sincerely,
An old fogey who still remembers a 300-baud modem
I know it's hard to imagine, but we have not always had email. When a character in your story, played by an actor who looks older than I do, checks his email in bed before getting up because he got in the habit in college, it kind of throws me out of the story while I check the actor's IMDB entry just in case he's actually younger than I am. But no, the actor was born in 1962 and the character is generally considered to be around the same age. Which means that when he went to college, starting in 1980 or thereabouts if he was eighteen, he probably didn't have a computer, let alone an email address, let alone a computer he could use in bed.
For reference purposes, your character would have graduated from college before AOL was formed and before Microsoft released MS-DOS. He was in college, barely, when Apple released the Mackintosh, the first Mackintosh, long before Apple called everything an iSomething. He would have a junior before SMTP was formulated as the standard email protocol.
The short form of this is that having a fifty-two year old man reminisce about his email in college is only slightly less jarring than having Elizabeth Bennett calling her aunt in London in 1801.
Sincerely,
An old fogey who still remembers a 300-baud modem